


jump off a cliff cause you know, baby

by Memelock



Series: sylvix week 2020 - now 100 percent more on time! [2]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M, and you know dorothea because, other people mentioned but it's a childhood friends situation, sex quest, this is largely just a propaganda piece for my own dimitri nickname preference so spread the word
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-22
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:34:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26605309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Memelock/pseuds/Memelock
Summary: Felix’s senior thesis is on variants in risk factors for ankle injuries in adult athletes depending on the season of their sport. Felix’s senior project is finding out what the hell is going on with Sylvain’s sex playlist.//this is for day two of sylvix week 2020: college AU.
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Series: sylvix week 2020 - now 100 percent more on time! [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1933810
Comments: 16
Kudos: 95





	jump off a cliff cause you know, baby

**Author's Note:**

> this is for day 2 of the 2020 sylvix week — college AU. i can’t believe how much effort i put into this meaningless piece! if you’d like to listen to sylvain’s sex playlist, it’s [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/74ffXL78QtaG1wwRYALgWa?si=ftJkvZjaQOqLIh7cBiKjig). it's not very long because i'm not at all creative and let's say sylvain refreshes it instead of just adding to it. title is from “little bit” by lykke li.

“Has it ever occurred to you that there might be an actual reason why you’re so curious about this?”

Ingrid is gesturing across the table in their apartment with a piece of celery, half of which is already in her mouth, caught between her teeth, and Felix folds his arms. “It’s simple curiosity,” he says, unconvincingly maybe. “I’ve had to hear enough rumor about it. I think it’s my right.”

Ingrid frowns. “Rite? Like a rite of passage?” Her eyes widen, like she’s been struck with a cattle prod, and she leans back in her chair fast enough to almost knock her Economics of Poverty textbook off the table. She pauses to steady it, its ironic priciness never lost on her, then continues her thought. “Are you going to fuck Sylvain?”

It’s all he can do to roll his eyes. “You’re ridiculous,” he says. It stings a little, just how unthinkable the idea is. He knows she doesn’t mean it that way, isn’t even aware that her question is barbed by her tone, but it sticks nonetheless. “I’ll just… let him take one of the edibles Claude’s friend keeps bringing to his parties the way he’s always insisting he can.”

“Hilda?” Dimitri emerges from their shared bathroom, surely having done damage to the careful organization Ingrid tries to impose on the two of them. He’s in a hoodie and jeans, still toweling the last of the water from his blond hair. Felix tries very hard not to think about the fact that Dimitri has been deemed worthy to hear Sylvain’s sex playlist, albeit a couple years ago and only once or twice, depending on which of their gossipy friends you believe — it’s surely evolved since then, and Dimitri has been respectfully tight-lipped. “I believe she gets them from a coworker.”

“I don’t care where she gets them from, they’re fucking strong,” Felix says stubbornly.

“Strong enough to — what, knock Sylvain out so you can try to guess his password and study his fucking sex playlist?” Ingrid, as she is wont to do, strips the issue down to bones so bare they’re embarrassing to confront. “I genuinely think it would be easier to just sleep with him.”

“It is very easy to sleep with Sylvain,” Dimitri says, voice just a little too fond. On his mental whiteboard, split down the middle, Felix adds another tally mark to the side of _twice_. “But couldn’t you just ask him? Or simply look at his Spotify?”

These are things Felix has tried, nothing but coy responses and a persistently private roster of music accessible only to members of a club he has yet to join. He encapsulates that in a glare and a shake of his head.

“I mean,” Ingrid says, her voice unbearably matter-of-fact, “you could just, like, start dressing a little more… his type. And just, you know, go for it.”

“Ingrid means sluttier,” Dimitri explains proudly.

“Look at you, learning from your boyfriend,” Felix teases, the first to recover from Dimitri confidently dropping a word that two years ago he might have glared at either of them for saying.

“He is not my boyfriend.” Dimitri doesn’t quite manage to roll his eye, doesn’t quite manage to hide a flush either as he hangs his towel on the drying rack.

“Which do you think is less likely?” Ingrid begins thoughtfully, taking another bite of celery. “Dimitri actually making it official with Claude, or Felix sleeping with Sylvain and reporting back on the sex playlist?”

“You know what?” Felix asks, flipping open whatever syllabus he had been looking at before this unfortunate conversation started. “Fuck you.”

“Oh, Felix,” Ingrid says, as Dimitri thuds into the third chair at their table next to where the fourth side is pushed up against the dividing half-wall to the kitchen to make the room at all navigable, “I believe in you. You have two whole semesters. And that mesh shirt Dorothea gave you for your birthday. Dimitri wouldn’t dream of wearing something like that.”

“I do not need a mesh shirt to accomplish my goals,” Dimitri says, pointedly, and based on the way Claude looks at him half the time Felix has to agree.

“I hate that shirt,” Felix says.

“Maybe,” Ingrid points out, “but Sylvain might not. And then who knows, you could be the lucky guy in Sylvain’s bed listening to the dulcet tones of Ginuwine or goddess only knows what.”

Even from Ingrid’s sarcastic lips, it’s a tempting thought. The rubrics for Exercise Prescription are even less interesting than they were when he first sat down to review them.

//

It’s not that Felix has always wanted Sylvain. Far from it, actually. In high school he’d found Sylvain’s promiscuity a little repulsive, at least partially because it seemed like something neither Sylvain nor the people he slept with really enjoyed. When he, Ingrid and Dimitri had all started on the Fhirdiad campus, like every other kid from the middle of nowhere, Faerghus, always dreamed of, they’d all had the chance to see just how fucked up Sylvain had gotten away from them, and while collectively dragging him out of that nightmare had brought them closer together in a way none of them would ever have wished for it had also obliterated any chance Felix might have been interested in Sylvain. So he’d thought at the time.

But then Sylvain had graduated. He’d actually managed to do it, finished his bachelor’s, gotten into the MArch program, stayed in Fhirdiad, shaped the fuck up. And suddenly, on one of the last days of Felix’s junior year, he had looked up at Sylvain across the shitty coffee table in his shitty grad student apartment, red hair and glasses and faded freckles just starting to reappear like stars away from the sun and one of Felix’s Applied Biomechanics flashcards upside down in his hand, and his heart had thudded in his chest, one betraying beat.

The Sylvain of now is different from the Sylvain of before, certainly. He is safer for himself, less cruel and destructive, he has a tattoo under the left half of his collarbone that he did not have when he graduated. But for all that, it’s the things that are the same about him that changed the scenery so suddenly. Felix wants Sylvain for the forest fire burning under that Lake Placid surface, for the way he can immediately read and fix a situation before anyone else knows it’s broken, for the tendons working in the back of his hands over the drafting table, for the smoldering wood of his eyes, for the grin that crosses his face often enough to permanently etch a resting dimple into his right cheek, for his voice and his height and his Molotov cocktail personality. It’s disgusting, really, but Felix has had three hot and lonely summer months to itemize and break down and understand his feelings, and they run unfortunately deep and detailed.

No one else knows, or at least no one else is letting on that they know. And that’s just fine with him.

//

It’s a month into the semester when Felix realizes that the normal murmurings aren’t going around. Even as Sylvain had cleaned up his life, it was inevitable that he or Ingrid or Dimitri or Dorothea or poor sweet Bernadetta would have to overhear some unfortunate person in the cafeteria or the locker room at the gym or the hallway between classes in the science building sighing to a friend, in person or on the phone.

_I think it was called “Boner Jamz”. Like with a Z._

_…two different Fall Out Boy songs like it’s 2008…_

_He like, didn’t turn it off while he was getting me an Uber, so that felt weird._

He actually texts Dorothea to ask about it after enough radio silence. Maybe Sylvain is sowing his wild oats in the art world now. In addition to a mini lecture about just asking Sylvain about the playlist, Dorothea confirms that 1. she is an adult now and post-grad life is far too busy for her to be concerned with this type of shit, and 2. no one at the opera house is talking about having sex with Sylvain.

Cool. Felix can work with this. He could work with it right this second, with Sylvain across from him at their three-person table, chopsticks-deep in a takeout box full of lo mein. He just… hasn’t yet.

“I swear if I have to hear Hanneman say the word ‘load’ one more time I’m walking out of the classroom,” Sylvain says. “Like I know that’s kind of what I signed up for with Structures but it’s awful.”

“I can almost hear it in that accent you always give him,” Felix says. “Like he’s some Victorian factory manager.”

Sylvain chuckles. “Okay, I’m exaggerating a little bit with that. But like just a little.”

It impresses on Felix yet again that Sylvain is just here to spend time with him. He’s not sobering up, not hiding from some conquest, not doing remedial work on grades he’s lazily left to rot. Just hanging out. He hadn’t even bailed when Felix let him know Ingrid and Dimitri had gone after all to the latest in the lecture series for the econ majors that Dimitri, for whatever reason, was interested enough in to keep attending, or just a good enough friend to not leave Ingrid to go alone or with other econ majors who, as Ingrid is fond of telling them, are so hit or miss it’s almost never worth it to try.

“You’d think you’d be used to it after you TA’d for him for three straight months,” Felix offers, unsympathetically. “I’m sure even in the undergrad classes Hanneman is talking about load-bearing stuff all the time.”

“Maybe,” Sylvain agrees cheerily, fumbling a piece of pork, which should be embarrassing but instead his deft work with the chopsticks just leaves Felix stewing a little over the implications that the skill of his fingers leaves in its wake. “But it’s different when you’re getting paid to do something instead of paying for it.”

“Fair.” He could just ask. About the playlist or the suspicious silence from the ever-present, ever-changing peanut gallery of Sylvain’s sex life. Dorothea’s and Ingrid’s faces float around in his mind like cartoon birds around the goose egg of an animated animal head, nodding in sync with each other. “You think you’re gonna TA for him again this summer?”

Sylvain tilts his head across the table, dangerous, like a bird eyeing the thickest worm in the loam. “Why, gonna miss me if I leave Fhirdiad, Fe?” Luckily he doesn’t get a chance to answer that one before Sylvain is steamrolling on. “Don’t worry about it, the thing about being done with undergrad is you have to live somewhere for good. You can’t just leave. So, I’m stuck here until my lease runs out or until they kick me out of MArch.”

“So no hope for a break then,” Felix sighs, but he lets one corner of his mouth turn up so Sylvain can’t act too sad and put-upon. “Either way, it’s more about whether or not I’ll be in Fhirdiad, right? Depends on if I get into DPT here or somewhere else.”

Sylvain scoffs. “Where’s the _if_ from? If you wanna get in here, you’ll get in here.”

Felix’s last dumpling sits, tempting, in the plastic container, sheen of chili oil catching the light as he turns it over and over again. “I mean, my advisor thinks it’s likely, but who knows?” he asks, trying to sound humbler than he feels. Praise from Sylvain, in whatever form he can get it, goes to his head in an unfortunate way. Not that it’s wanting. “It would be more convenient to stay here. The landlord can be difficult about subletters.”

“Gross,” Sylvain says, emphatically, pushing the defeated lo mein container to the center of the table with the air of a topic change. “Lame of your roommates to leave you alone on a Friday night, and especially for such a dorky reason. I hope Ingrid’s cleaning the bathroom this weekend or something at least.”

“Our _friends_ are actually doing something worthwhile. It’s more lame of me to be alone, huh?” Felix quips, and Sylvain rolls his eyes.

“I mean, you’re not,” he says. “I’m here, right? Therefore you’re not lame.”

“Are you lame for being available?” Felix says it before he’s thought it through, an instinctual push toward the question still burning in the back of his mind. “Isn’t there a club you should be in, or some girl you should be hitting on?”

Sylvain waves his hand like Felix’s hopefully playful accusations are so much smoke in the air between them. “The night’s still young, clubs around here don’t close until late thanks to you crazy undergrads. And there’s a handsome guy right here I could hit on if I really wanted to.” It’s humiliating, the way Felix’s gaze jerks up to meet Sylvain’s, painful almost in the earnest naked hope shot with adrenaline through his veins. Sylvain looks about as enigmatic as he ever has, eyes warm and grin languorous, and Felix searches his face for another moment like he lost something in it before he winks across the table at him. “Want me to hit on you, Fe?”

“Hmmph,” is all Felix can muster at that, and Sylvain laughs and it hurts because it’s a nice sound, genuine, and not for the first time Felix wonders when he’ll be able to climb his own walls high enough to wave Sylvain in instead of pushing him away at every opportunity. He’s done a lot to repair anything broken between them, and the goddess knows Felix is eager to meet him halfway on whatever is left. “Don’t waste my time.”

“Never,” Sylvain says, and something heavy is in his voice for a moment before he’s up from the table, grabbing the textbook Felix had been pretending to review over their food and putting it in the cabinet on top of Ingrid’s plates. “All right, I insist you not study for one night of the semester at a minimum. So start thinking about what movie you want to watch.”

//

In the end, he does actually wear the mesh shirt. Ashe isn’t the type Felix would have expected to throw a birthday party anywhere but his own apartment, but you only turn twenty-one once and if the guy you’ve had a crush on for at least six months’ worth of late night tormented texts works at a bar and offers it to you — well, Ashe is only human, Felix has to assume. Maybe this would mark the end of Felix hearing about the purple-haired older guy third-hand from Sylvain.

Speak of the devil — his phone buzzes, on the bathroom counter in front of Felix, deliberately not playing music because there’s only so much noise he can stand in one night. _still coming back to mine after?_ He and Sylvain had decided this already, once Felix had caught wind that Yuri had invited Dorothea and Claude. Fifth wheeling for them and his roommates could be fun occasionally but tonight Felix isn't in the mood. Plus if Sylvain brought someone home, it would be a prime opportunity to get a listen in to The Playlist, or so Felix had told himself, rather miserably, in front of the mirror as he tugged the mesh shirt into place and tweaked his ponytail for an unheard of fifth time. He sends a _yes_ before he can overthink it much more.

“You look cute,” Ingrid sing-songs around the door of the bathroom, where she’s clearly been patiently waiting her turn at the only decently-sized mirror in their chaotic apartment. “I can’t believe the lengths you’re going to for an almost definitely mediocre playlist.” She slinks her full frame around the door, looking like she’s put substantially more thought into her outfit than she has ever before in Felix’s memory, which is not photographic but is certainly long. “Unless that’s not your goal after all.”

Felix wills his face not to betray him where he leans over the sink adjusting the single upper helix piercing he’d gotten in ninth grade as part of a brief rebellion with Dimitri and Ingrid, neither of whom had been stupid enough to actually keep their respective piercings, but it almost certainly does based on the look across Ingrid’s face. “Don’t,” he asks, pleads, futilely, but Ingrid’s mouth is already as wide as her eyes.

“Holy shit,” she says, like she’s just been hit on the head by Isaac Newton’s apple. “You don’t care about the playlist. You want to sleep with Sylvain.”

“I… I care about it,” Felix stammers, whirling away from his own reflection, unable to face whatever his expression is doing. Ingrid is backed up against the door of the bathroom, overdramatic as she tends to be in her triumph, clutching her chest like he’s threatening to stab her instead of wordlessly begging her not to poke further at the soft-rotten core of his vulnerability.

“Yeah. Maybe,” Ingrid argues. She doesn’t need to argue, she knows she’s right, and Felix doesn’t like it at all. She pushes off the door with her elbows, bumps him aside in front of the sink with her hip to take her spot at the mirror. “Maybe you care about the playlist, maybe a little. Or maybe that’s just an excuse to try to have sex with Sylvain.” Felix, unfortunately, feels his face heat traitorously, furiously yanks his ponytail again as if it will change anything. All it changes is the shape of his bangs, and since he can’t even tell if it’s better or worse than before he decides it’s time to leave it be. “Goddess, I don’t wish for your taste.”

“I mean, you’re with Dorothea. I wouldn’t want to change anything either,” Felix snaps, like it might chase her off the scent, but Ingrid is dogged as she does her hair.

“You know, you could have just told me,” she says, just as the damned door opens again and another cheerful blond head pokes around it.

“Told you what?” Dimitri asks, and Ingrid meets his eye in the mirror and jerks her head to beckon him in. He does, closing the door behind him as though there’s anyone else who might make their way in, making it quite unnecessarily crowded. Felix perches on the toilet lid, both to get away from their combined threatening aura and out of unspoken roommate politeness when one is done with the mirror in a shared bathroom.

“Felix wants to fuck Sylvain,” Ingrid announces, pinning a strand back against her developing braid. “Like, he wants to _fuck_ him.”

“Right,” Dimitri says, and Ingrid and Felix turn in uniform shock to gape at him before he continues, “He has wanted to hear the playlist since the semester started.”

“No,” Ingrid argues, before Felix can silence her, which is regrettable because Dimitri stops in the middle of pulling his hair into the same half-ponytail he wears to every single event that happens outside of their apartment, eye going wide with realization. “It’s not about the playlist, Meetch. Felix just wants to sleep with Sylvain.”

Dimitri’s eye in the mirror is so, so blue, blue like the sky, blue like a lake, blue like a flame where it meets Felix’s, haunted and amber on the toilet lid. “Felix,” he says, bobby pin dropping from between his lips, and Ingrid catches it before it slides down the drain. “Do you… like him?”

Does Felix like him? Yes, of course Felix likes him. Everyone who knows Sylvain likes him. He’s smart, kind if you’re his friend, tall, at least sort of funny, relatively in shape — at least the show muscles. And he’s known Sylvain practically since birth, since he could know anything at all, so yes, Felix likes Sylvain. But it’s more than that. He _wants_ Sylvain. Many people who see Sylvain want him, fewer people who speak to him want him, still fewer know him like Felix knows him and want him. Yet here Felix is, seeing him, speaking to him, knowing him, wanting him.

Ingrid and Dimitri are looking at him expectantly, eyes in shades of the sea, hair like gold between their fingers and their pins. It strikes Felix that they look good, happy, comfortable, and that unlike them he is wearing a mesh shirt and trying to hide his feelings like he’s eleven years old again and his father is scolding him for crying. He looks at the decrepit blue rug under the feet of his two closest friends and nods, once but firm.

Ingrid whoops, louder than a gunshot in the cramped bathroom, and Felix can feel Dimitri’s look like the shine of the sun on his face. “Unbelievable,” he mutters, but Ingrid is shaking her head in the mirror.

“Felix,” she says, victoriously, “we are going to get you laid.”

“Yes,” Dimitri agrees, and when Felix looks to him to glare more effectively he can’t even manage it because his smile looks downright kingly, even while he murmurs around the bobby pin Ingrid had fished out of the sink for him once more. “Knowing that, the shirt was a good choice.”

//

The bar where Yuri works isn’t fancy. Felix is grateful for this when Sylvain shows up to Ashe’s birthday party with a gift in hand and a shirt unbuttoned to the base of his sternum, and even though the music is deafening house, Sylvain’s laughter as he hugs Ashe before moving to greet any number of other people he knows is suddenly the only thing Felix is aware of.

Ingrid, annoying but reassuring at his side until whenever Dorothea makes her appearance, elbows him in the ribs with her usual force plus the strength of the vodka soda in her hand. “Don’t say a word,” he yells directly into her ear, the only way he’s sure she can hear him, and if only he could look away from where Sylvain’s skin is shining under the dramatic lighting Yuri had insisted on for the dance floor he might have seen Ingrid’s incredible ability to project smugness and the sweet joy in another person’s happiness that only someone as completely guileless as Ingrid could feel. Instead, Felix immediately busies himself with his own gin and tonic when it looks like Sylvain might turn in his direction, almost choking on his lime for the trouble, and settles himself against the wall for the evening.

Dorothea appears several minutes later, sweeping Ingrid away with a cheerful wave to Felix. Ashe and Annette find him after a while, asking all sorts of questions about his thesis and his DPT application plans that are far too serious for a birthday party in a bar where they have to be shouted to be heard above the music, but eventually they go for another round of drinks and Felix is alone again, casting his eyes over the crowd, definitely not looking for—

“Hey.” Of course. Sylvain is in Felix’s space almost before he can see him, _just to be heard over the music_ , Felix’s mind helpfully hypothesizes. But then something interesting happens. Sylvain leans in just a little closer than Ashe or Annette had, closer even than Ingrid, and takes a fingerful of the mesh shirt which Felix had bashfully hidden at the last minute under a button-down that Dimitri had forcibly re-unbuttoned again before they actually got to the bar. “You look way too good to be standing over here on your own.”

Felix’s heart, shameful, treasonous, skips a beat, and he actually stares at Sylvain with his mouth open for a moment that hopefully isn’t too long before he recovers, _tch_ ing and swallowing the rest of his drink in one go. “I’m not on my own now that you’re here,” he says, letting one side of his mouth turn up. Just one. Out of the corner of his eye he catches sight of Ingrid, who despite being practically glued to her incredibly beautiful girlfriend who also happens to be an amazing dancer is somehow still glaring at Felix like he’s already done something wrong. He puts her out of his mind.

“Yeah, but you’re just _so_ dressed for dancing, Fe,” Sylvain argues. He still has the pinch of Felix’s shirt between his fingers, and he tugs it, just a little. “Do me the honor?”

“Where are we, the Middle Ages?” Felix replies, but he’s already following Sylvain, walking him backwards out onto the dance floor, and under the hot lights Sylvain looks like a vision, red hair filled with illuminated undertones, brown eyes dancing, skin warm and shot with freckles like paint splatter. It’s all Felix can do to move with him, he hopes naturally, to not jerk away from the hands Sylvain puts on his hips, to keep his own fingers demurely at Sylvain’s shoulders, and if they end up under the lapels rather than over them that’s no one’s business.

The beat crawls inevitably forward until Felix can feel it pulsing through his feet, slow and heavy, driving him and Sylvain closer together until they’re grinding — there’s no other word for it, not to Felix’s semi-disbelieving mind, not to Dimitri’s wide eye and mouth, not to Ingrid and Dorothea’s visible but inaudible wolf whistles from across the dance floor. Sylvain is helpfully not noticing them, because he’s looking right at Felix, eyes hot and flatteringly intense, almost as hot and flatteringly intense as the hand he has pressed into the small of Felix’s back, holding them together. It’s enough to make him flush, if the lights and press of other bodies isn’t sufficient already, the fingers under the button-down through the mesh, the tantalizing separation between Sylvain’s lips, the sweep of his hair down over his forehead an inadequate veil over the heat of his gaze.

For a moment, Felix thinks Sylvain might kiss him. For a moment, Felix knows he wants Sylvain to kiss him. But then his other favorite redhead takes the transition between songs to tug him away for a much more energetic dance, and Annette is lucky she’s so damn sweet and that it takes all of Felix’s effort that might otherwise be spent on snapping at her to will his erection away, at least for now. Despite his best efforts to be irritated, he hands her back over to Ashe with a stupid grin on his face before Dorothea and Ingrid have him each by an arm, tugging him to a somewhat less central part of the bar.

“Did we imagine that?” Dorothea shouts into his ear conspiratorially, Aperol heavy on her breath. Felix shakes his head, bumping his cheek against hers, half giddy as he realizes that, no, Dorothea and Ingrid did not imagine him closer to Sylvain than he’s been in a long time, did not imagine their eyes locked like they were in a teen drama looking across the hallway of a high school at each other.

Ingrid is grinning at him, only a little unfocused, swinging his arm back and forth where she’s still holding it. “You are _so_ gonna find out what’s on that playlist.”

//

In the end he doesn’t hear the playlist.

Of course he doesn’t; once Sylvain gets his hands on him, pressing his back to the front door closing behind them, Felix can’t imagine, can’t conceptualize, him doing anything else. In fact, with their mouths open against each other, Sylvain’s tongue flat and exploratory alongside his, Felix thinks he might die, might kill Sylvain, if he dares to do anything except kiss him, touch him. The thought of Sylvain’s fingers busied with anything but winding into Felix’s hair, right at the nape of his neck, stroking along his cheek, even to unlock his phone, to hit play on the track list that had accompanied any number of hookups, is nauseating. Felix grabs his placket tighter, hauling Sylvain closer, kissing him harder like he’s trying to convince him of something. Sylvain grins against his mouth and it’s like a high, something for Felix to chase and catch and chase and catch again.

“Excited?” Sylvain murmurs, every movement written against Felix’s lips and tongue where they’re still pressed together.

“Shut up,” Felix snaps, or tries to snap, but it turns out more like a gasp as Sylvain’s hand crawls up under his shirts, both of them, hot on the skin of his back.

“This is cute, by the way,” Sylvain says, fingers curling around the hem of the mesh shirt, taking it up under the button down with his knuckles. It’s gratifying to hear, more than gratifying maybe with the frisson it sends up Felix’s spine, but also irritating because he can already picture how smug Dorothea is going to be about it. And speaking of smug, Sylvain isn’t done. Of course. “It’s probably too vain to ask if you wore it to impress me, right?”

Felix’s first instinct is to lie, huff and look away, to deny the undeniable, but the moment the febrile tingle of a flush threatens to give him up he decides to lean into it, in his own way. “Did it work?” he mutters, looking down and therefore not in any way prepared for the growl out of Sylvain’s mouth followed by the press of his lips at Felix’s neck, which means he’s also not in any way prepared to stifle the moan he lets out. Good thing he was already blushing.

“Goddess,” Sylvain says, and his breath is hot as steam against his skin. “Did it work, he says.” Another hot kiss, open-mouthed over his pulse. “Did it work,” he repeats, incredulous, the press of his fingers still tangled in Felix’s shirt and into his back like a brand. “Fe, I want you so bad I can’t even think.”

So no, he doesn’t learn what’s on Sylvain’s playlist, allegedly _boner jamz_. Felix does learn a few other things, though.

He learns that Sylvain has a little stubble growing on his cheeks, scattered over his jaw, rubbing itself on Felix’s thigh until his skin is red and angry with his cock in his mouth. He learns that Sylvain has a scar on his back, right by his spine, where the nerves are cross-wired, that a tongue or a finger pressed to it makes him arch, makes him twitch. He learns that when sex is good, when it’s really good, when it’s the best Felix has ever had, he’s loud. He’s fucking loud, like Sylvain could bury inside him deep enough to unearth everything he’s held in for eight years and change, like Sylvain’s fingers in his mouth could pry loose the sounds he’s kept locked away. He learns that it would all be embarrassing, if it wasn’t for the dark-eyed and dilated-pupil reverence Sylvain takes it with, looking for more, pushing him farther.

He learns, too, that he’s a coward, and that the true humiliation is waking in the morning next to the sleeping best friend you’re in stupidly deep with, panicking, and having to crawl into a cab of shame in a mesh shirt. Felix learns to chalk the button down up to a loss.

//

Dimitri, because the goddess does not look with kindness on Felix, is in the kitchen when he returns to their apartment, standing against the counter with a bowl of annoyingly wet-looking cereal, shirtless — which is a good sign for Dimitri, and a bad one for Felix. He turns the lock as slowly as possible.

“Good morning, Felix,” Dimitri says, primly, like he says everything. His half-ponytail from last night is barely intact. It’s all Felix can do to grimace at him. “I trust you had a pleasant evening?”

“Felix is back?” It’s a muffled but, unfortunately, recognizable shout from behind the door to Ingrid’s room, and Felix figures he has thirty seconds max of Dorothea putting the minimum amount of clothing on to be considered decent before he has to face her particular brand of post-sex music. He figures he might as well enjoy himself, pushes past Dimitri to grab the still-open box of cereal. Animal.

She bursts out in one of her girlfriend’s seemingly endless horse-themed t-shirts and the miniskirt she’d worn to Ashe’s party. It’s a look, Felix supposes, and it’s sufficiently threatening when she leans against their half wall, crossing her arms. “Spill,” Dorothea says, and it’s expressly a command.

Felix shrugs. He doesn’t know if he has the emotional capacity, the wherewithal, to do anything remotely like spilling. Dimitri is looking at him, chewing each bite of his cereal meticulously, without even thinking of getting another spoonful until he swallows the previous one. It’s like reading an owner’s manual for having a mouth.

“Hello?” she says, waving one hand into the kitchen toward his face. “What was on the damn playlist?”

His own breed of animal, Felix reaches right into the box and shovels a handful into his own gullet. It tastes like tree branches, like every other cereal Dimitri buys. “I didn’t hear the playlist,” he says, and from the other room, where Hurricane Dorothea had first made landfall, he hears a muffled, groggy _What?_. “Might as well wait for Ingrid,” he adds, to forestall questions. Dimitri atomizes another bite of cereal in the time it takes Ingrid to drag herself to the kitchen in a sports bra, sweatpants, and what seems to be a towel wrapped around her shoulders. Dorothea looks at her like she’s trailing stars in her wake. Felix suddenly wants to be sick.

“What do you mean you didn’t hear it?” Ingrid asks, when she’s seated at the table, blonde top of her head visible over the half wall, cup of terrible instant coffee in front of her. “Did something happen?”

“I mean I didn’t hear it,” Felix explains, again. “What more is there to say?”

Dimitri makes a disappointed noise, which nearly interrupts his calculated shredding of twig cereal, but he swallows demurely before saying, “That is a terrible shame. Sylvain has wanted you two to have sex so badly.”

Felix reddens at that, profoundly, torn between immediate curiosity and the need to escape this magnifying glass. “Speaking of sex,” he spits, grabbing a defensive handful of what is shaped like flakes but with, of course, none of the flavor, “where’s Claude?”

“Ah.” Dimitri is completely unfazed. In fact, he looks almost dreamy just at the thought of him. Felix’s stomach turns over again, and nothing exciting in the cereal could have caused it. “He had a morning shift at the dining hall this morning. Was it not sweet of him to stay the night even knowing that?”

“Could you clowns please make this official already?” Dorothea asks, and Felix feels the distinct moving of the lens away from him. He bites down the sigh of relief.

So. Sylvain had wanted to fuck him.

//

It turns out good sex with someone he cares about, ugh, renders Felix incapable of taking a next step for a while. Ingrid comes home from her night class a few days later, finds him sitting at their table looking at old injury blotters and drops into the chair across from him. The way she sets her bag on the floor is portentous.

“Did you sleep with Sylvain on Ashe’s birthday?” she asks, and it’s then that Felix realizes she’s back from class later than usual. He looks up. She looks serious.

“Yes,” he says, because lying to Ingrid is always an impossibility. She’ll believe it at the time but she always finds out the truth, and then she feels like she has the right to make you feel guilty. Felix doesn’t have time for that shit.

“Did you enjoy it?” she continues, and it’s surprisingly blunt. His eyes narrow. “Just answer, I don’t need the details.”

“Yes.” Did flowers enjoy the sun? Did bears enjoy sinking their teeth into stream-rushing salmon? Felix’s head still spins sometimes when the fabric of his jeans is too rough against his thighs. “What’s with the interrogation?”

“Sylvain called me.” Ingrid never lies either. She can’t get past the stage where you have to make someone else believe you. “He didn’t mention anything, we didn’t even really talk about you, so don’t be mad. He just… sounds weird.”

“Weird how?” Felix asks.

“Weird like… I don’t know, weird.” She struggles with her words for a moment. “Like everything he was saying, he was really saying something else.”

“It was good,” he says. She winces, but really it’s her fault for asking. “I just didn’t hear the playlist.”

Ingrid is silent for a moment. Felix is back to jotting down ankle vs. wrist vs. small joint injury numbers for one of the Adrestian teams, so he misses the twist of her mouth turning sly. “Oh yeah?” Like it’s a thrilling development in their lives they’re discussing. “Sounds like you need to give it another shot.”

Felix types ACL as sVO without noticing, someone named Von Bergliez’ sophomore year gymnastics injury utterly disrespected, and his eyes snap up to look at Ingrid. She’s schooled her expression by now, calm as anything, looking down at her phone. Dimitri’s words echo in his mind, though. _Sylvain has wanted you two to have sex so badly._ Medieval phrasing aside, it had been good, good the way it is when both people want it. Better than that, but Felix isn’t ready for that yet.

“I’ll text him,” he says aloud. Ingrid smiles and tells him yet again that she doesn’t want to hear about it.

//

If Felix hadn’t been so pathetically desperate for Sylvain to respond quickly, he would say Sylvain responds to his text pathetically, desperately quickly. It isn’t anything earth-shattering. Quite the opposite in fact. They manage a conversation, Sylvain is refreshingly normal, which is to say wildly irritating, too many emojis.

It’s easier to get started the second time. Sylvain says he still has Felix’s button down from the party ( _ashe’s, u remember?_ ) at his place, asks if he wants to stop by before his next class to come get it. Felix shows up exactly thirty minutes before Exercise Prescription, just enough time for them to skip the small talk, enough time for Sylvain to come down his throat, enough time for Felix to jerk himself off in Sylvain’s lap, grinding against him, not enough time to chat afterwards, certainly not enough time for mood music. But, it feels better too when he leaves this time around, shirt stuffed in his backpack that he thinks might not even be his. Like if it could happen more than once it’s fine, it’s just something that’s happening. If Felix feels like his own skin is pulling away every time he has to stop touching Sylvain, if Sylvain is watching him go through the process of leaving when he thinks Felix isn’t looking with a kicked-puppy regretful cast in his eye, they don’t say anything.

//

“You LIKE him, like him!”

Ingrid is almost shouting, all three of them way too deep into a homebound Thirsty Thursday for which they’d, unfortunately, allowed Dimitri to make the cocktails. Dimitri’s drinks are always too fucking strong. Why they let the guy with one eye to judge proportions and no working tastebuds to speak of mix drinks is a problem for the Friday morning edition of the three of them.

“You just don’t want to SAY it.” She settles back against the couch on Felix’s right, smug as though she’s made an indisputable point — which, fair. “You guys look at each other like you’re… in a movie or something.”

“It’s true,” Dimitri confirms, betraying his drunkenness by using a contraction. He nods solemnly on Felix’s left.

“Okay,” Felix says, and Ingrid whoops a little prematurely, but the screwdriver-and-a-half already in him allows him to be forgiving. “So what if I do like him? Sylvain doesn’t…” He hiccups, tries again. “He doesn’t have like, feelings for people he sleeps with.” The hiccup might have been something trying to crawl out of his throat, he realizes, belatedly.

Ingrid and Dimitri already know, of course, because Ingrid has one hot cheek pressed to his shoulder, Dimitri’s arm is slung around his neck, before Felix can even register them against the sudden heat in his eyes. It’s the vodka, he’s sure of it.

“You are not just someone he is sleeping with,” Dimitri says.

“Meetch is right.” She’s still sort of almost yelling, but a lot fonder now. “Like I said, you guys are always looking at each other.” She nods, sagely, like she’s dropped a pearl of otherwise inaccessible wisdom.

“So what?” Felix asks, when his gaze is a bit less watery. He crosses his arms, elbowing both his friends for their trouble. Ingrid groans dramatically. Dimitri might as well have had a breeze glance over his ribs. “We’re friends.”

“Yeah,” Ingrid agrees, but it sounds like a counterpoint. “But, like, we’re friends and you don’t look at me like that. Sylvain doesn’t either, thank the goddess.”

“Sylvain never looked at me like that, either,” Dimitri says, voice a little rueful. After two times hooking up with Sylvain himself, Felix mentally wipes down the “once” side of the whiteboard in his brain. Dimitri definitely heard the playlist twice. Two times and he’s signed a contract of silence that he won’t even break for their decades-long friendship, the repair work they’ve done. Typical Dimitri. Felix might have done the same thing if Sylvain asked him. Maybe it’s still the vodka talking.

“Okay,” he passes the verse and bridge to round out the refrain, “so what the fuck do you want me to do about it? He’s going to do that thing, the Dedue thing.”

“Dedue thing?” Dimitri asks.

“Dedue thing,” Ingrid confirms. “Things are going well, the other person starts getting interested, Sylvain panics and ghosts them. If they’re lucky.”

“Was Dedue lucky?” Dimitri asks.

“No,” Felix says.

“No,” Ingrid also says. “Sylvain ran things with Dedue into the ground. It was ugly as shit. You guys have no idea how lucky you weren’t living with me back then. It’s really difficult to be on Res Life when there’s a whore half-blacked out and crying in your office every other night.”

“Sylvain is not a whore,” Dimitri says, indignantly, which Felix is glad for because otherwise he might have been the one to say it. He can picture Ingrid rolling her eyes. _You LIKE him, like him._

“If Sylvain Dedues you,” Ingrid says, and her voice is almost painfully sweet, enough to make Felix roll his head back on the couch to look down at her where she’s looking up at him, “I will personally kill him myself.”

“Helpful,” Felix says. Dimitri pats her head with the hand that’s been hanging in her face over Felix’s shoulders, and heaves himself up to make more screwdrivers. Felix thinks he feels his liver wince.

//

_hey._

_oh hey mr. stranger!_

_is this a booty call?_

_because i accept ;)_

_no. idiot._

_jk fe_

_what’s up?_

_charon’s class still making you crazy?_

_yes. but that’s beside the point._

_you going anywhere for founding break?_

_oh. i mean no._

_where am i gonna go?_

_home? lmfao_

_yeah. sorry._

_dimitri’s going to almyra._

_“bro’s trip” with claude._

_wow._

_he does NOT learn._

_yeah. claude invited ingrid too actually so they’re both going._

_aww fe_

_they like you too i promise!_

_gonna get lonely while they’re gone? ;)_

_hmmph._

_geez take an emotional laxative for once_

_all right i’ll ask i know you won’t_

_wanna come over for the weekend?_

_if you want._

_the heights are always empty at breaks. it’s weird._

_if YOU want ;)_

_just kidding_

_promise not to be an asshole_

_not more than usual_

//

They manage not to jump each other on sight when Felix shows up with a duffel bag on Tuesday night after his last shift at the campus gym before closing for break. It’s a near thing, at least for Felix, Sylvain looking all casual, like he’s a step away from being in bed anyway. Felix is kind of starting to hate how he looks good in everything, including the stupid grey sweatpants Sylvain is wearing when he shows up that give new meaning to the memes, the ratty t-shirt from his freshman year orientation that looks soft enough to melt between his fingers if he were to slip it up his stomach, tight around his chest…

Goddess, it’s a near thing but it doesn’t happen right away.

It starts, though; slowly, in pieces at a time. Felix shamefacedly lets their fingers brush when Sylvain passes him a glass of water. Sylvain shifts Felix’s legs around on the couch where he’s wrapping up the last of his homework so he’s sitting under them, knees bent over his thighs. While Felix is scrolling one-handed through an article on high incidence of stress fracture in gymnasts, he spends too much mental energy on working up the courage to rest his free arm casually against the back of the couch, just close enough to Sylvain’s head for his fingertips to brush his scalp, like it’s an accident. Sylvain shifts, also like it’s an accident, leans into him, drops a cinder block on the gas pedal.

It takes significant willpower for Felix to break the kiss they’re tangled in, laptop somewhere on the floor, Sylvain pressing every inch of him into the couch, hands doing very impressive things to Felix’s skin at his neck, the small of his back. It means he has to stop sucking on Sylvain’s tongue, which is a borderline heroic effort. Sylvain’s eyes crack open, like that takes just as much fortitude.

“Do you have like… music?” Felix pants, and he immediately feels a sick guilt in his stomach at the way Sylvain brightens up, a little pink dusting his cheeks under those goddamn freckles.

“Wow, romantic of you,” he murmurs, sitting up like there’s a magnet he’s resisting pulling him back down, grabbing his phone, tapping the screen a few times and tossing it again with flattering force in the interest of getting his fingers around more interesting things.

It’s… actually good, better than something he thought might have a title with the word _boner_ in it, for the time that Felix has any kind of focus to spend on listening to music. Quickly as things progress there are better things to concentrate on, Sylvain’s throaty dirty talk, the hitches in Sylvain’s breath, Sylvain’s moans when Felix does anything particularly surprising, just theatrical enough to let him buy into them.

Felix listens carefully, like he’s memorizing them together, the sound of their spit moving from mouth to mouth in the slide of their tongues, the soft fabric sounds of his hoodie as Sylvain pushes it up over his head, the hot frissons in the air of skin on skin, the whiny noise from the base of Sylvain’s windpipe when Felix slides his hands under his shirt at last, gets his fingers pressed between ribs, grazing over his nipples like a blushing virgin. It’s a delicious cacophony, an orchestra of carnal instruments. Music may as well have never been invented.

There are more things to learn this night, the size of Sylvain’s hands wrapped around both of them, the closeness of their faces, connected by one strand of saliva and the intermingling of breath, the heat of Sylvain’s waist against Felix’s legs where they’re tight around him, holding them together. It’s an intoxicating test he passes as he comes, dripping back onto his own stomach, Sylvain following.

He kisses Felix after, eyes warm, lips smiling where they press against him. The way Sylvain gets his hand around Felix’s neck is compelling, like his fingers were molded to slot against him, thumb to the joint of his jaw, index and middle fingers threading through the hair at the peak of his spine. It’s tender, and Felix misses him the moment he pulls away, mumbling something about cleaning up that he does not hear in the interest of watching Sylvain’s mouth say the words. It’s a good mouth, Felix decides. It’s a good ass walking away from him toward the kitchen too. Felix has an idea, or a recollection, deep in his post-orgasm haze, and he reaches his hand blindly down for Sylvain’s phone.

It’s not really fair, he knows, that he still remembers Sylvain’s irresponsibly unchanged password from one of the times he’d been close to blacking out in Felix’s or Ingrid’s or Dimitri’s rooms, back in the day. It feels a little too like subterfuge, trying to type it quickly enough that Sylvain won’t see him, glancing down at the Spotify app.

And then things are kind of overwhelming, enough that when Sylvain is back in his field of vision he can’t stop himself from asking, or something like it. “Your playlist,” Felix blurts out, like he’s finally breaking under an interrogation, and Sylvain, sweats hiked back up around his waist, bare and distracting chest, freezes with a hand towel half-tossed to Felix, who is, oh yeah, still lying there with two people’s worth of come drying on his stomach.

“Uh,” Sylvain says, eloquently, “what?”

“The name.” Felix feels like his heart is scrambling inside his chest, trying to pound its way out of him. “That’s not your sex playlist.”

He can see it, like stop motion footage of a slow sunrise, Sylvain recovers himself slightly. “I mean,” he says, grin curling one corner of his mouth, still nervous-looking, “we did have sex. Depending on what you count as ‘sex’ I guess.”

“You have a playlist. Every time you hook up with someone you play it. It’s like a campus urban legend at this point.” Laying out the facts feels like the only way Felix can ground himself. “You hooked up with me and you didn’t play your—”

“Okay.” Sylvain, thankfully, cuts him off at this point, settles back between Felix’s still-spread and embarrassingly still-naked legs to wipe him down. The towel is, very kindly, damp with vaguely warm water but it leaves gooseflesh in its wake nonetheless. Or, at least, something does. “Okay, this isn’t exactly how I was picturing this going.”

“Picturing what?” Felix snaps, and Sylvain gives him a look that makes him want to instantly shut up, like he’s being a bad boy and he should be good and quiet instead. What the _fuck_ is up with that.

Sylvain doesn’t answer, not directly. “Okay,” he says again, steeling himself. Felix knows that sound. “So, yeah, that’s not my usual playlist. Not even gonna try to deny I have one. Yeah, Fe, maybe it’s one I made specifically for, like, if I ever brought you here. I don’t know. Does it bother you?”

Does it bother him? Felix can’t think of anything that bothers him more, or less. His skin feels like it’s crawling, but underneath there’s a strange kind of warmth, realization. Okay, to quote Sylvain. He made a sex playlist specifically for having sex with Felix, identifiably so by its name. That means something. “I mean,” he says, out loud, when it’s clear Sylvain is going to keep waiting for him to answer, “not like, conceptually.”

“So then what is bothering you?” Sylvain asks, but he doesn’t linger in the silence this time for Felix’s response. “I thought… I mean, it seemed like maybe you were interested in this being more than a hookup too.”

_Too?_

“If I was off base, I guess that’s, like, not surprising,” Sylvain is continuing, as though he can’t see the mushroom cloud impact of his previous sentence blooming directly over Felix’s brain, into his sternum where, again, his heart is rattling the bars of its cage. “I mean when you, like, ghosted me for a week after the first time I got worried like we’d made a mistake, but then you texted me and I thought maybe you were just figuring things out. I don’t know. I probably assumed too much. If you don’t want anything else then I guess just hopefully be flattered? I’ll take what I can get.”

 _Too. You LIKE him like him. Sylvain has wanted you two to have sex so badly. Anything else._ It’s like pieces of an equation assembling themselves into something solvable, like the tide rolling over him and rolling back out again in rhythm, like the last piece of a puzzle slotting into place to complete the picture.

“Sylvain,” he says, and the name is like honey on his tongue, “what do you want out of this?”

Sylvain’s eyes go wide in a troubling moment, like no one has ever asked him this before, but whatever he finds in Felix’s face must be enough, must be good, because he scrubs one hand across the back of his neck, which unfortunately draws new and exciting lines of muscle over his body that Felix’s eyes can’t help but follow, like they’re moving of their own volition. “I guess…” He looks vulnerable, which is new. “Huh. I guess I was hoping I’d get this far, so we could have this conversation, so I could convince you to try something out with me.”

“Something,” Felix repeats, affect just a touch too flat for anyone else, but Sylvain knows him. They know each other. It’s so easy for him to understand.

“Yeah, okay, that was lame,” Sylvain agrees. He drapes the towel over the arm of the couch behind him, reaches down to Felix’s ankle, touching it with every finger en route to grabbing his briefs where they’re hanging precariously from his foot. Felix gets it, then, offers his other leg, lets Sylvain slide them up over his calves, his knees, his thighs, knuckles dragging all along his skin, Sylvain bent at the waist so at the end of it all he’s in the perfect position to drop a kiss on Felix’s mostly-clean stomach. The whole ordeal is so sweet, so tender, that he almost has to cover his eyes. But he can be brave, this one time, with Sylvain’s cheek resting against the skin over his kidney. “Wanna go out with me?”

It’s like a punch to the lungs. It’s like coming home.

//

It’s Ingrid who’s eating when he gets home this time. Someone is always in their kitchen, making use of none of the appliances except maybe the odd operation of the microwave. She gives him a little wave over what looks like half of a sandwich, maybe from the road.

“Hey,” Felix calls, locking up behind him, tossing his keys into their key bowl, something Claude had given Dimitri from that coworker with the Etsy store and the legendary edibles, and Dimitri had promptly shared with their household. “How was break?”

Ingrid grins around a mouthful of bread and veggies and goddess knows what else based on the smell coming off her paper parcel. “It was really good,” she explains, beckoning him over with a jerk of her head. “Almyra is awesome. Claude’s family is nuts. Oh!” she adds, more urgently. “Yeah, you technically lost the bet. Dimitri finally realized Claude was, like, actually into him and so now they’re together. In fact, they’re like literally together. Don’t go into Dimitri’s room without knocking.” She shudders. Felix has no desire to know what kind of embarrassing things she’d seen on their little _bro’s trip_.

“I mean, I did sleep with Sylvain first,” Felix says, and just the thought of him sets an embarrassing glow in his chest. Something on his face must give him away, because Ingrid’s look instantly turns shrewd.

“Yeah,” she says, “but you never got to hear his sex playlist. On that note, how was _your_ break?”

“Hmm,” he says, just to annoy her, “how was my break?”

“Duh.” She flicks him in the forehead with the hand not holding her precious sandwich. “I’m guessing you didn’t stay all by yourself in the heights this entire time? I know Sylvain never goes home for breaks anymore. I figured you guys would, like, implode whatever is going on between you in that time.”

Felix frowns. “Thanks, Ingrid. As I was going to say, I spent the weekend over at his place.” He gestures to the duffel bag, which she’d somehow failed to notice. Felix blames the presence of food.

Her face freezes for a moment, then a sort of triumphant smile spreads across her face. “Okay!” she says, drawing the word out a little dramatically. “So then what day did you finally hear it? If it was any time before _very_ early on Saturday morning Almyra time then you won the bet after all. Which would be great for me, because I could ask Claude for my ten gold back.”

“You bet with Claude on whether he would make things official with Dimitri?” Felix asks. “Seems unethical.”

“Whatever,” Ingrid says, waving the last bite of her sandwich around like a dismissive hand. “Doesn’t matter anymore, tell me.”

“I have bad news for your gold,” Felix explains, starting to feel a little smug with all the warmth inside him. “I still didn’t hear the playlist. At least—” Smug _._ “—not the one he made for everyone else.”

Ingrid’s jaw drops, comically, mouth miraculously clear of food. “Felix!” She’s practically shouting. “Are you saying he—”

“I’m saying,” Felix cuts her off with a grin even he can’t deflate, pushing off the counter to trudge to his bedroom, begrudgingly unpack his bag, probably text Sylvain after a few stubborn minutes of trying to put it off, “I’ll definitely have to keep sleeping with him if I want to figure it out.”

**Author's Note:**

> andddddd if you’d like to listen to sylvain’s felix playlist, it’s [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/65oO3nO75vnF5mvn9rQfMH?si=uQb5azuRRVKoh6sYBV1hmQ). :) thank you so much for reading!


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